[RE]

Something that would be an actual solution would bus the migrants, give income to all, and jobs to those who can work.  A program would be set up with the task of integrating the migrants into society.  Free education would be part of the package.  Housing would be provided.

There was a story a while back about some Billionaire who was buying up land to build an entirely new city.  Why not pick some location and give them building materials and tools and let new immigrants build themselves a city?  Call it "New Start City".

Anybody including current citizens could go to NSC as long as they can use a hammer or drill and build.  Have some kind of standard plan for the housing units that is modular and units can be stacked up as more people come in.  Once you get the housing going, then they can start biznesses using their own currency, and all that gets sent in is food and waste removed.  Eventually, it transitions to a regular city and they develop a dollar economy to generate income to buy food.  A 10 year plan.

Won't happen of course.

RE

[K-Dog]

That is a great idea and it would work.  From day one these people would have purpose in their lives.  Knowing the end result is parity with regular Americans would make the place clean and law abiding very quickly.  The residents would do it.

Your solution addresses human need and does not warehouse people like the runway solution, which is a sure way to breed a criminal society.  Give young men nothing to do, and they will find something to do.  And it won't be good.  The humiliation of living on a runway would twist me.

Your plan has no chance of being implemented.  Reactionaries will see that your approach encourages migration.  Their solution uses bullets and is much cheaper.  Capitalism makes decisions without consideration of humanity, so the bullet approach will be the solution given current conditions. A capitalist oligarchy resembles a feudal state.  Kings did not welcome outsiders and give them help.  Oligarchs are kings.

Current conditions which the Diner would like to see CHANGED.

[RE]

That is a great idea and it would work.  From day one these people would have purpose in their lives.  Knowing the end result is parity with regular Americans would make the place clean and law abiding very quickly.  The residents would do it.

Your solution addresses human need and does not warehouse people like the runway solution, which is a sure way to breed a criminal society.  Give young men nothing to do, and they will find something to do.  And it won't be good.  The humiliation of living on a runway would twist me.

Besides the obvious political resistance you would get, the biggest logistical problem would be finding a location to drop New Start City.

Let's project its Maximum Size at 100,000 refugees.  Since last month 30,000 crossed the border in TX, that's a little over 3 months, but some of them have other places to go already, relatives or friends who got here before.  So say it can absorb new arrivals for 4 months.

The location therefore needs a water supply that can supply drinking water for 100,000.  This water needs to either be piped in from a current water treatment facility that has enough excess capacity, or you will have to dig new wells to supply a new facility unless it's near a ground water supply like a big lake or river.  Only other way would be to truck in bottled water.  That would be pretty expensive.

Gray water for washing and bathing could be used directly if the source water is reasonably free of ag runoff or industrial chemicals, and that could be seperate.  You would need enough water for that also.

So the 1st question is where in the FSoA is there enough undeveloped land close enough to an adequate water supply for NSC?  Lot's of land in the desert, but no water.  No good.  Most locations that have the water supply necessary already have cities or towns built there.  The only places I can think of that aren't built up are mountainous regions where building roads is difficult.  Also difficult to build the housing, you'll need to have heavy equipment to level out building pads for the modular homes.  I would make the basic unit 16'x16', for 256 sqft per person. 8'x16' modules for each additional person in a family unit.  The parts for the modules thus fit nicely on a typical semi trailer.  Wall panels would already have the electrical conduit and plumbing pipe fittings, so you just snap it together with cordless drills.  Bathroom comes as a 4'x4' module with a composting toilet.  Kitchen a 4'x8' module with sink, 2 burner electric stovetop, microwave/convection oven and small refrigerator/freezer.

So, now in addition to finding the location, you'll need heavy equipment for leveling pads and a cement mixer for pouring foundations.  You'll need a large building onsite where the module parts can be assembled.

Even though all this will obviously cost money, I'm sure it would be cheaper than what NY is spending right now on their shelter system, which is in the $Billions$.

Identifying a possible location is the first big hurdle.  Anybody got an idea on a spot?

RE

[K-Dog]

Trying to find an unpopulated area with enough water in the west is difficult. 

Find run down areas like Camden, New Jersey.  Level this shit to the ground, then get the residents to work building new housing.  They can help with the demolition.  Give them something to do.  It will take a few weeks to define Allen Town like floor-plans for new housing modules and get what is essentially an employee owned corporation managed by the government for their benefit set up.  The bricks in this picture could be cleaned and pallets sent to every Home Depot in the country.  They would sell.  The city will drain money at first.  In time the city will pay taxes.

It becomes half refugee camp and half new city under construction.  In in two or three years the refugee camp is gone and only a new city remains.  A new city of new tax payers who can help fund the next wave of rebuilding.

We have the slums:

  1 Camden New Jersey
  2 Detroit, Michigan
  3 Flint, Michigan
  4 East St. Louis, Illinois
  5 Baltimore, Maryland
  6 Gary Indiana


Six from the top of my head.  There are more.


Looking harder:  The document matches the area in the photo.  The buildings are already down.  This does not matter.  The Brownfield area is only an example.

[RE]

Trying to find an unpopulated area with enough water in the west is difficult. 

Find run down areas like Camden, New Jersey.

The water supply is already in place & sewage too.  So good there.

Don't think it would be self sufficient economically in 3 years.  The reason Camden, Detroit and all the rest of those neighborhoods look like that is because there are no jobs there.  Rust belt cities where all the manufacturing left 50 years ago.  You would have to get some billionaires to put some kind of manufacturing or distribution centers or something.  Not sure what because we are headed for recession.

RE

[K-Dog]

You would have to get some billionaires to put some kind of manufacturing or distribution centers or something.

Can we do it without the billionaires?  Yes the plan MUST provide jobs, but billionaires want short term profit.  There will be no profit for a few years.  Investments take a while to pay off, nothing new about that.  I would know, billionaires are overrated.   All they really are are regular people with a lot of money.  There is no special genius there.

Better we set up state funded companies on the tax dollar until the place can actually pay taxes.  A planned economy, professionally managed.  Like what the Israelis should have been doing in Gaza, but didn't.



If the mob can build Las Vegas, we can rebuild the ghetto.

[RE]

Better we set up state funded companies on the tax dollar until the place can actually pay taxes.  A planned economy, professionally managed.  Like what the Israelis should have been doing in Gaza, but didn't.

I'm fine with financing it through the state, but what would these companies DO?  After they finish building their homes, you have the same problem in Camden they had where they came from.  There's nothing in Camden anybody outside Camden needs or wants.  No way to get dollars flowing in to Camden.

You could create a state run company to make say Wind Turbines, but those are produced elsewhere already, so unless you sell the ones from Camden cheaper, they won't sell.  This is the fundamental problem of a dying industrial economy.

RE

[RE]

Love this design.  I've played with it myself on Sketch as a DIY project starting with a 20' flatbed trailer.  I figured I could build it for about $30K just for the shell but not with the servo motors you wold need to make it open at the touch of a button.  Also without the bathroom and kitchen appliances and alarm and solar panels/electrics.  The $85K price for the complete unit is great.

If I was healthy, I probably would have built it for my retirement travelling Chattaqua show.  Definitely something I would recommend as a prep if you can afford it.  Take it anywhere to get out of the way of a wildfire, hurricane or flood.

Video at the web page.





https://www.foxnews.com/tech/with-press-button-tiny-house-folds-into-box-you-can-tow-anywhere

With the press of a button, this tiny house folds into a box that you can tow anywhere

[RE]

Wow, I feel really bad for those poor landlords, don't you?  It's just horrible how these homeless people will go live in their vacation rental properties!  Can you imagine the nerve of these people!

Personally, I'm surprised there isn't more squatting going on.  NYC has 50% vacancy rate in office buildings.  Whole floors are empty.  Gotta be better than sleeping on the street.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/atlanta-landlords-confront-squatting-surge-in-vacant-rental-homes?utm_source=newsshowcase&utm_medium=gnews&utm_campaign=CDAqEAgAKgcICjDi7PAKMIXduwIwldrvAQ&utm_content=rundown&gaa_at=g&gaa_n=AZsHK_mtqlaZ5LtvQf4ZZ_qauf1QIEnwKSBr8xTSGblToO1idr-uzO0QeBVuPqsziVJHzMpA0qRuWM0kw0X7uPZeK_nA4w42nw%3D%3D&gaa_ts=65b2f476&gaa_sig=7JpP-n3Fn-tN4AN6Sx9FVbNDUh52r22j_SNboxcFqyFKFWzP9msQM4qZTechpkUyLxA2dIfVBawLdukdfYXPVg%3D%3D

Atlanta's Squatter Problem Is Vexing Wall Street Landlords

RE

[RE]

There's a shortage of affordable housing, and the solution the Market comes up with is to build MOAR unaffordable apartments!  If you missed my Where have all the Houses Gone? blog, I wrote about this stupidity a few weeks ago.

A Goobermint that had any CFS would have put out subsidies and tax credits for builders to be putting up new apartments that would rent in the $500-1000 range a year ago, which is more in line with the prevailing wage these days which is around $20/hr.  Mickey Ds pays $18 around here, CNAs get a little more.  This grosses around $36K, $1000/mo rent is $12K.  That's 33%.  You still have lots of other fixed expenses of course, so if you are left a few hundred to keep the economy going with an occasional movie you're doing good.  $1500/mo rent leaves you nothing or negative.

The longer this goes on, the worse the crash is gonna be when it comes.  With the POTUS election and the border crisis, this summer loooks ripe for a breaking point to be hit.

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds

Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds

RE

[TDoS]

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/25/1225957874/housing-unaffordable-for-record-half-all-u-s-renters-study-finds
Housing is now unaffordable for a record half of all U.S. renters, study finds
RE

As a point of logic, if 50% of US housing is unaffordable for renters, and there must be millions of renters in the country...does it follow that the homeless population, recently measured at something like 750,000 or so....has increased to millions more? And no one has noticed?

Is it fair to theorize that a word like "unaffordable" being used when evidence doesn't substantiate its use is just more proof of everything everywhere all at once having been degraded by the Internet and Joe Averages running amuck and bringing down public discourse to the level of 2nd graders? Only because 2nd graders haven't learned the nuance of many words yet and could be expected to say silly things at their age.

[RE]

As a point of logic, if 50% of US housing is unaffordable for renters, and there must be millions of renters in the country...does it follow that the homeless population, recently measured at something like 750,000 or so....has increased to millions more? And no one has noticed?

No, because unaffordable doesn't mean you don't have income enough to pay the rent, it means that once you do pay rent there's not enough left over to cover the rest of your normal bills, so you start having to choose between having a roof and having heat, or having a roof and having food.

For renters making under $30,000 — who already faced the most severe struggle to afford housing — Airgood-Obrycki "didn't think it could possibly get that much higher." But the report found it did nudge up, to an all-time high of 83% who are cost-burdened. She says the amount of money they have left over for all other household expenses has plummeted by nearly half, to just $310 a month.

Good luck paying your utilities, car insurance, phone & food on $310/mo.

Generally,rent is figured to be 30-40% of your income, but when you make $30K and rent is 80% of your income, it is unaffordable.  Not enough left over to live on.  Not the same thing as homeless.

RE

[RE]

In my prior post, I said the general rule of thumb was 30-40% of income goes to rent.  This based on my experience that Property Mgmt companies won't approve you as a renter if the cost of the Apartment exceeds that.  However, the FSoA Dept of Housing $ Urban Development says otherwise:

Tenants should generally allocate no more than 30% of their income toward rent, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

One of the few places I ever got that low was the place I lived longest up here before I lost my leg  which was before covid and the housing crunch, which was low income housing with rents adjusted for income and came in at 25%.  It killed me to give up that place, it was perfect for me.

I finally got some good newz from Cook Inlet Housing, run by the Native corporation up here but offers units to white folks too if you're old and crippled along with poor, and I probably am down to about 6 more months of waiting time for a building right near the SNIF here, having been on their list for a year already.  So 18 months total if it comes through of waiting.  Rent on that one will come in at about 35%, but I think it includes utilities.

It's almost impossible to get rent below the federal guidelines for affordability if you make less than around $35K, even in low income housing, which all have long wait lists now.  Past $35K, you no longer qualify for this housing and have to rent in the open market, so to get down to 30%, your income has to jump up to around $45K.  $35-45K is no man's land, you don't qualify for low income housing and open market prices are 40% of income and up.  It's not until you make around $50K that it becomes fairly easy to find places you can afford, although they are probably going to be smaller or in trashier neighborhoods than a person with this income usually would expect.  This is typical teacher salary around here or construction workers.  They make more hourly, but winter is very slow and they take lower paid work from Nov-Apr, so it drops the annual total.

Open market housing is risky, because when you rent it originally it might have been affordable, but when your lease is up the rentier jacks up the rent to the prevailing rate, which has been rising faster than inflation.  So maybe you were paying $1300 and after 2 years your new bill comes in the mail for $1600, a 20%+ hike.  Your rent is now unaffordable, although you are not homeless...yet.  At this point you cut back on going to the movies and eat more spaghetti at home.  But then your transmission goes and you put $2K on the credit card.  Add a $100 monthly payment to try and pay that off.    Now you're negative every month and on your way to homeless, though it will take some time still before you miss a month's rent.

This is the status of  a large portion of the population at the moment, right on the edge where if one thing goes wrong, the dominoes start to fall.  Once they do realize they have to find somewhere cheaper to live, they start looking but there's nothing out there they qualify for.  They're not homeless but they can't afford the available housing.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/rent-homelessness-harvard-report-center-for-housing-studies/

Record number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report findsRecord number of Americans are homeless amid nationwide surge in rent, report finds

RE

[K-Dog]

Calling it an affordability crisis is not dealing with reality.

Affordability crisis means let the market decide.  Build more housing, force the price down.  BUT WHATEVER YOU DO DON"T CHANGE THE SYSTEM.  Those who own do not want to be like everyone else.  Plan on keeping the owning game going.  The cretins who think this is the only way to run a society far outnumber you.

'In May, the Biden administration announced a Housing Supply Action Plan to close the affordability gap and ease housing costs. The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing and incentivizing areas to reform zoning and land use policies to build more lower-cost housing. It also calls for homebuilders to adopt more efficient construction methods.

What a crock of shit.  The cost of building housing is not the issue.  The economy is dead is the issue.  There is not enough cheap energy to keep the complexity of life going as we know it.  Jobs are not paying enough, and landlords expect to be paid regardless.  Reforming zoning sounds good and the resourceful bullshitter can find examples where it would help no doubt.  But greed, not zoning is the issue.  Zoning did not create the housing crisis.  The price of housing was allowed to inflate to obscene levels.  Everybody in for the past 50 years in America has wanted to get rich owning real estate.  And real estate is how the rich get richer.  It is their preferred method.  The system is rotten to the core.  Through the years is has been housing bubble after housing bubble.  Emphasis has never been on home ownership.

Mortgage payments are perpetually confused with home ownership.  It pisses me off that there are so many feeble minded people that can be bought off with 'affordability crisis'!  Home ownership begins when the mortgage is gone. Not when people are rewarded for refinancing.

The market destroyed things but the faithful expect a market to fix things.  This could rightfully pass as a definition of insanity.

'The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing.

In other words loan some rich people money to build more housing.  Make it a good investment for everybody who already has money.  Financing to the rescue.  What a relief!  After thirty years of financing destroying things, and increasing inequality it is good to know financing has a change of heart.

[RE]

Right here is the fundamental stupidity perpetuated with housing;

The plan aims to boost the supply of affordable housing by enhancing existing federal financing

"Financing" doesn't make housing more affordable.  The only things you can change with financing are the length of the loan and the interest rate.  The interest rate is determined by the federal funds rate the banks borrow money at +2% or so so they profit on the spread.  Da Fed manipulates this to control inflation, so if it's at 5%, mortgages are gonna be 7% or more for a riskier borrower.  Term lengths are already at 30 years, if you go to 40 years that's approaching the lifespan of houses, which is about 50 yeas on average.  Except in the rare cases of historic homes that have been meticulously maintained, by the time a house is this old it has accumulated so many issue with plumbing, mold, roofing and rot it's cheaper to raze it and build new than to try and fix everything up.  A 40 year term isn't home ownership, it's rental.  It's multigenerational to pay off a 40 year mortgage.

2br $2150/mo

If you look at most houses built in the 70s in Wonder Years type suburbs, they used cheap materials and have been through a dozen different "owners" over their history of varying dedication to maintenance.  Nobody ever paid the house off, it just kept getting resold with new mortgages handed out at ever higher prices.  These places are now all substandard housing in the rental market as "affordable housing".  People buying a house don't want them, they want new houses with new appliances and the latest in insulation and heating systems.  Financing tricks aren't going to make the new houses any more affordable.

The only way you are going to get affordable housing is to build homes with the target rental price determined before you build it.  No idea what  the square footage and materials cost is to build something like town homes with 1-3 bedrooms, but they have to rent out at $500-1500 per unit depending on the #bedrooms.  Those were the prices at my old Creekwood apartments.



We had all demographics there from young families to old folks, all low income.  Enough safe space for the kids to go outside and play.  I don't see why we can't just put up more buildings with this type of plan instead of keep building single family McMansions.

RE